My website grafpup.com is currently down so the official release announcement will follow later, but the images are already on the mirrors for those who want to give it a spin. The biggest news, and the reason this is alpha and not beta, is the move to kernel 2.6.20.2, now with some enhanced features like aufs, virtualization support (completely untested), bootsplash, and much better firewire support. This kernel should fix several issues that some people have been experiencing with sound in both Grafpup and Puppy, as well as some other odd irq conflicts.

Although the kernel is the big news it is not the only thing that has been worked on. I have fixed several other small issues, such as the name of the savefile being more than eight characters long (messes with win98 and earlier) and the ability to shutdown or reboot if you are not root. Quite a few other small things have been fixed as well, but because of time constraints I was not able to get to everything on the list. For that reason the primary reason for the existence of this release is to get the new kernel into the hands of as many testers as possible, to find out if there are any more hardware issues.

Another thing I have decided to do is to start supporting a stripped down barebones type cd, which will run fast on even imited hardware and also provide a good base for custom remasters. Several people have expressed their appreciation for how polished Grafpup is but have no desire to have all of the graphics applications, and prefer a more "conventional" desktop. So this will be a good dual purpose iso for those uses. Coming in at 63MB, of which 17MB is device drivers and does not load into memory, it should run fine even with only 64MB of ram, although slow cpus will always have trouble coping with gtk2 applications.

Another fairly big switch is that for the first time Grafpup is shipping with Abiword rather than Ted as a word processor. After a somewhat lengthy discussion on the Grafpup forum I had to concede that Ted just did not cut it, particularly as relates to internationalisation and character support. Through very careful trimming I have managed to keep the size to within about a megabyte and a half, and am hoping to get it down a bit more for the final. This is Abiword-2.4.6 compiled specifically for Grafpup and with the US-English spelling dictionary. I will begin offering other language dictionaries as unleashed packages shortly.

There are two primary download locations for Grafpup now.
http://grafpup.org/http://www.bubbleletter.org/downloads/
All alpha iso images are released with their date in the file name, so for the most current snapshot go to grafpup-20070321-{browser}.iso. There are now three supported builds, the traditional (for grafpup) opera, seamonkey, and dillo, which is the above mentioned barebones. There is a possibility that in the future a kde build may surface.

You can post bugs and other feedback here, but when grafpup.com goes back online shortly the forum and bugtracker there would be preferred.

Well, I'm running it but I've got no sound. lsmod shows my snd_via82xx module loaded but no sound. I ran alsaconf and it sees my card but still no sound. I'll play around for a bit with it before I have to leave for work to see what the deal is. Everything else seems great so far though.

Well that's bad news and very surprising for me. That's the same sound driver my box uses and this kernel fixed all sound issues for me. Actually, it fixed the sound on two of my computers. Oh well, this is what alpha releases are for. When you get a chance run dmesg for me and post the results, in case aything useful turns up there. Plus information about your sound card. There have been numerous bugs in via based soundcards with recent Linux kernels, starting with 2.6.17, and I'd like to play a part in getting them sorted out if possible.

I rebooted again and tried acpi=off with the same results and then I rebooted one more time and the only thing I did different was in my xorg setting. I choose my second option (can't remember what it was) and now my sound works. I'm guessing that shouldn't affect my sound but for whatever reason it works this time. Here's my newest dmesg incase you want to see it.

I'll do alot more playing around tomorrow but now that my sound works I'm extremely happy with this! Thanks alot Nathan. This kernel fixes my acpi, ide-dvdrw, & sound issues. This cutdown version will be great to make a remaster out of as well. Right now I'm running as root but will try being a regular user tomorrow.

Many many thanks Jason, for the detailed reports. And I'm extremely happy that sound is now working for you. I'll be interested to see what kind of remaster you might come up with.

I've had a couple requests for the new kernel in a form that would be usable in Puppy proper, so I plan to get to work on that asap. My apologies for running so far behind on my projects but a lot of things have come up over the last week.

Another thing I have decided to do is to start supporting a stripped down barebones type cd, which will run fast on even imited hardware and also provide a good base for custom remasters.

Quote:

a good dual purpose iso for those uses. Coming in at 63MB, of which 17MB is device drivers and does not load into memory, it should run fine even with only 64MB of ram, although slow cpus will always have trouble coping with gtk2 applications.

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